Marketing Restaurant Online

Last week there was a viral video sensation of Susan Boyle that was circulated on the internet to all the major media networks around the world. I saw the video of Susan Boyle on CNN and was stunned as everyone at the audience when they watched her sing live at Britain Got Talent.

The interesting thing to take a note about this incident is the viral effect of her popularity due to the  speed of the video being transmitted on the web at a click of a mouse in hours. On Friday or Saturday she made a performance and within hours of the show went live lots of the fans uploaded the video on Youtube and it spread around the world like a wild fire. Within few hours and by now few days it has been watched over 47 million times already around the world. It has broken the previous viral video records of President Barack Obama Presidential Victory speech and Ex President George Bush shoe attack video.

So as a business like your restaurants what can you learn from this instant world wide viral marketing incident? Can you think if you could create one video of your restaurant  that would go viral? What would it do to your restaurant business bottom line?  The question now to ask yourself is if this sort of viral video can be created for your business that would have instant  viral marketing worldwide for free.

The short answer is YES. Now lets look at the viral video more narrowly. Most of the viral videos that we see are not deliberate though people try to do so. It should be natural and organic. To tell you the truth you never know which one is going to be viral. So there fore one has to keep on recording videos and among may be 100’s video 1 of them will be a hit. And that’s all it takes. 1 video can do the magic like it did for Susan Boyle.  This principle is very well executed by the holly wood movie distributors. They license several movies let’s say 10 or 20 to distribute around the country movie theatre. They really don’t know which one is going to be hit. Some will fail, the others do average and one will be super hit. Even others fail to make money, one that made big will recuperate all the investments and also make them profits on top of everything they lost on other movies.

I believe you as a restaurant business should follow the same formula. Every day at restaurants they have some kind of parties, or birthday celebration. When people are having good time with couple of drinks they start dancing with rejoice and happiness. May be you could capture this happy moments in your simple Sony video recorder or may be Flip video recorder which you can buy now for less than $100. Some of them might start singing like Susan Boyle without them realising  it to be that  good. You never know who has that talent and where and when it is going to come from. So the thing that you have to be on top of is to be prepared and ready with your stunt video camera to capture right then and there in your lenses. Once you record the song or funny dance you could upload on Youtube and embed it into your restaurant blog.Make sure that you take your customers permission. It is a courtesy. I am sure they would say Yes and would be delighted that you took the effort to capture in the video. In fact they would be surprised as no other competitors do it for them. If you want to see the example of videos or photos posted on the blog, you can check out Kogi Korean BBQ restaurant at www.kogibbq.com and learn how you can do the same for your restaurant.

So to get some fantastic free advertising from your viral video marketing, make sure you do make some occasional videos of your customers celebrating at your restaurant. You might be as lucky as Susan Boyle to capture that one viral video out of blues and that could be the ticket to your restaurant marketing success which you  probably could not buy even with all the  traditional medias like tvs, newspapers and radios.

You might not be able to handle all the crowd of fans that would rush to your restaurant.  Well that is a good problem to have right.Please share your thoughts if this is something that is helpful to you and also if you have suggestion on what topics would help your restaurant marketing effort. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. It was so popular that they disabled the embed function on Youtube so here is the link of the video.